Film and video producing is a profession for which there is an awful lot of specialized equipment, but that doesn't mean you have to have a huge budget to make high quality video. There are lots of items already in your house that can be re-tasked for video creation.

Putting Things on Things

Want to get you camera high above a crowd? Or to peer into a birds nest? Steven Spielberg might use a crane for this, but you can mount a tripod head to a telescoping painter's pole. These handy extenders can be used to get cameras or lights or microphones in places you may otherwise need a monkey and they usually range in price from $5 for a four foot model to $90 for one that will extend to 30-feet.

Hold Steady!

Many videographers shooting from the window of a car (possibly because they're videotaping lions) will stabilize the camera on a bag filled with sand or lead shot. Why bother getting an extra bag filled with sand when you've already got a five-pound bag of rice in the kitchen? If you have multiple bags of rice (or potatoes) you can also use them to hold down the legs of lighting stands so the wind doesn't catch your umbrella and blow it over.

Your Very Own Glass Bottom Boat

You can buy dedicated underwater housings for most camcorders that will let you take them into the pool or the surf but you can make your own camera's diving mask by simply placing your camera in a small fish tank partially submerged in the water. You may want to wrap your camera in a towel first to protect against incidental splashes, but you'll be able to get crystal clear video of people swimming underneath. You can also set it alongside your boat or canoe to get underwater shots of a lake, or action shots of junior netting his first bass.

Lighting Things

Fluorescent Lighting

It used to be that fluorescent lights were green and buzzed like steel bees and were a videographer's nightmare. Not so anymore, with the improvement of ballast and the creation of a good daylight balanced bulb. This means that with the right bulbs, you can pull down those fixtures over your workbench in the garage and re-task them to light people. With some cardboard barn doors you can control the spill as well.

Worklamp Lighting

It's not a big secret that you can go to your local hardware store and get a couple of 1000-watt work lamps and use them for video, but out of the box they don't provide very soft light or an effective light kit. You can bounce them from walls or ceilings, but there are some objects in your house that you can use in conjunction with them to modify the light.

Light it with iPads!

Director Michael Mann was faced with some unusual problems when trying to figure out how to light his 2004 movie "Collateral" which stars Tom Cruise as a hit man with a busy schedule. The biggest problem is that most of the movie takes place in a taxi at night - a notoriously under-lit environment. Mann didn't have the space in the back seat of the cab to put traditional lighting but cleverly used lights made from the same material that illuminates laptop computer screens - this allowed him to put large sources of illumination almost anywhere. When trying to light in tight spaces, don't neglect non-traditional sources of illumination such as your iPad, flat-screen TV or an old light box. Remember the inverse square law which tells us that if you double your light-to-subject distance, you reduce the amount of light hitting it to 1/4. This means with a low emitting light such as an iPad you'll need to keep it very close to your subject.